USA > Iowa > Story County > History of Story County, Iowa; a record of organization, progress and achievement, Volume I > Part 28
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Captain Chill also relates another incident not so striking but neverthe- less significant of the service of Company K. He adds in the same letter as that quoted above :
"I have been out thirty or forty miles on scouts. I was at Ripley, the county-seat of this country, also at Durhamville. I think the places are about half as large as Nevada and some very good houses but mostly de- serted. 1 saw some fine country in that vicinity and some good plantations. For instance, we called at one about three o'clock in the morning. There were about one hundred and twenty-five men of us, all mounted. We got feed for our horses, and some twenty got good beds to take a short nap. About six o'clock they commenced eating breakfast, and we all got a good breakfast and were away before eight o'clock. The folks complained some and said their help had left them. I counted about sixty around there of large and small, black and white, some as white as anyone. I saw in one lot some sixteen cabins vacant, and in this lot one family had mules, cattle. hogs and such property, and it looked as though in good times, or in times of peace, it was a regular stock-yard ; but property in man is about played o11t.
"I have heard a good deal about the poor whites in the south but never believed there was such a poor and ignorant class. I believe the blacks of northern Missouri are as intelligent as the poor whites of Tennessee. When this war closes you will see that instead of using shackles they will use school houses."
Still another citation to show the sort of incidents that livened matters up for the 32d during its service in the guerrilla country is taken from E. G.
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Day, who resigned the county clerkship to go into the quartermaster's ser- vice under Captain McCall and who was on duty at New Madrid, which was long the headquarters of the larger portion of the 32d, including company K. Writing about January of 1865 he said :
"The monotony of camp life at this post was somewhat relieved on yes- terday by the following occurrence which took place about eight or nine miles outside the lines. It seems a couple of negroes who were living inside the lines, concluded they would make a short excursion in the country, whether for pleasure or profit, I cannot say, but sure it is, that the niggers made the trip, as some of the Rebs can testify to their sorrow. While travel- ing along the road, the aforesaid niggers were accosted by some two or three white men, who ordered them to fall into line, as they were going to march them down south. The negroes, it seems, had taken the precaution to arm themselves with pistols before leaving home, and having no relish for a journey in a southerly direction, took the studs and refused to accompany the fellows, and upon their attempting to enforce the demand, one of the niggers drew his pistols, fired away and killed one of the chaps as dead as a mackerel, blowing the whole top of his head off ; when the balance fled for safer quarters, and the darkies took the dead Reb's horse and came back to the post. The commander of the post ordered out a scout who went and in- vestigated the affair, finding that the fellow killed had been a lieutenant in the rebel army for some two years past."
Concerning the fate of the kidnappers that Captain Child tells about, we do not know that there is any available record, but Col. Scott used to tell a story, that, we think, pertained to these parties. The story, as it is now re- called, was that after the chief kidnapper had been brought to camp. he was tried by court martial for nigger-stealing, condemned and sentenced to be hanged. The finding of the court martial was forwarded by Col. Scott, to the department commander, who later acknowledged its receipt and ordered the colonel to execute the judgment of the court martial. This the colonel had done, and the man was most properly hanged and buried. Some months afterwards, however, in the course of routine in the war department. the original finding of the court martial came back, through regular channels, to the colonel, with the endorsement of the department, that the sentence of deathi was disapproved, and directing that nothing further be done in the premises ; and, as we understand the matter, nothing further. in fact, was clone in the premises. It was all a part of the fortunes of war, and one vil- lain had met his deserts, even though the manner of his meeting them was somewhat irregular.
In the course of time, the 32d regiment was relieved from the work of chasing bushwhackers and catching nigger-stealers, and was reunited and sent into active campaigning. The first of these campaigns however was the Meridian campaign, in which the six companies only of the regiment saw their first hard fighting, but they were fortunate in escaping considerable losses. For this reason therefore, the trials of the march were quite as
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strongly impressed upon those concerned as were the incidents of battle and Captain Cadwallader, who had gone out in command of Company K. but who was now regimental chaplain, sent home to his wife a vivid account of the matter as he saw it. This letter was written from Vicksburg after the campaign was over and in it he said :
"I can no longer write, as I used to, that the 32d knows but little of the hardships of the war or the field. We have experienced both. A march by those on foot of more than 340 miles, carrying knapsack, canteen, haver- sack, and cartridge-box with fifty or sixty rounds of cartridges with the musket, resulted in many a blistered foot and wearied frame. Many a man gave out and had to be hauled. Some nights we traveled until 12 o'clock or I or even 2 o'clock, snatched a bite of meals, either cooked or raw, or hard tack if fortunate enough to have it, and down on the ground to sleep, when perhaps in one hour the bugle would sound and the drums call their weary limbs again to action-a little coarse-ground, confiscated corn meal without sifting mixed with some muddy water and the outside burned in the camp fires or the frying pan, with a tin of boiling coffee and, if time would permit, some fried meat, all rapidly swallowed and accouterments buckled on ready to fall in at the first tap of the long roll. After the first week out we were scarce of bread, the rations from wagons being either one half or one fourth only of the usual amount issued to soldiers. There was not mcal enough ( though the country was scoured for miles by parties sent out to forage) to supply an army of 30,000 men. There was no lack for meat and good meat too, fresh smoked hams, shoulders and sides, fresh beef, chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese and pigs by thousands. Neither was there any lack of corn and blades for all the horses.
"We saw but few men. Women and children would beg hard for mcal and meat to be left for their subsistence; but the boys answered. 'As your niggers are going away, you will not need much.' Some bore to have their houses sacked and even their bureau drawers without a word, manifesting either sullen silence or stoical indifference, while others would weep and wring their hands.
"I was sent in advance from Canton (on the railroad north of Jackson) with a train of teams and sick. Well, on the morning of the first of March at half past three it began to rain almost cold enough to freeze and con- tinued until near ten o'clock. The negro teams, being mostly cattle, had been ordered to continue their march all night accompanied by infan- try as guards. We had encamped in a low bottom near a little river which began soon to rise so that new additions to the log and rail bridges continually being made. The banks were so steep they had to double team to get out. Their wagons had no covers, and from 17 to 34 children in each wagon on top of their stuff, all drenched, and yct military law said 'Stop not a moment.' Little children three or four years old were out in the mud, bare headed, bare footed, bare handed and crying ; women being confined, both refugees and negroes, in the wagons
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just as they were; officers ordering men swearing, mules and oxen giving out and dying; wagons and confiscated carriages and buggies breaking down; add to this scene, 400 sick and convalescent soldiers, either crowded into wagons on loads of corn or wet and shivering around a fire almost ex- tinguished by the pelting rain. Many will never recover from the effects of that morning ; a number have since died; of the number is Geo. Pearson of Company K, 32d. He died in the wagon at 9 o'clock p. m. The same night at II o'clock when I had just begun to sleep, I was sent for to get a detail and bury him, and also a soldier from the 58th Illinois. I never witnessed so much sorrow in any month of my life as in that dismal forenoon."
THIE RED RIVER EXPEDITION.
Returning by a roundabout course from the Meridian expedition, the regiment was finally united and was sent down the river, and with the rest of the Sixteenth Corps under General A. J. Smith was assigned tem- porarily to service with the army of General Banks for the Red River cam- paign. This campaign was probably one of the most inglorious in which any Union army engaged during the war; and the fact that, in the most important engagement of the campaign, the 32d Iowa and the Iowa Brigade of which it was a part, rendered the most trying service on field of battle that was rendered by any command during that campaign, and did all that soldiers can do to hold their lines with success against superior numbers, themselves embarrassed by incompetent generalship and bad disposition of supporting troops, is one of the facts such as have to be recorded some- times in war, and the rewards of which have to be, in a large part, the satisfaction of duty heroically done.
What was the real purpose of the Red River campaign has never been made entirely clear to the historian and commentator of the Civil war. It was a campaign across Louisiana, on the line of the Red River, its apparent objective being Shreveport in the northwestern part of that state. It was an expedition into the enemy's country, but it threatened no strategic point, and could not, if successful, have any other effect than the reduction or destruction of his supplies. Such supplies, however, were west of the Mis- sissippi, which river was already 'held, from its source to its mouth, by the Union forces, was patrolled by gunboats, and subject to be crossed by the rebels only by stealth. Supplies from that quarter, therefore, could not be made to reinforce, to any extent, the rebel armies against which the forces of Grant and Sherman were then battling in Virginia and Tennessee. Be- ing in the nature of a side expedition, the effects of the Red river campaign could only be temporary ; and that a considerable army should have been thus employed, at a time when it might have been used in cutting the main body of Confederates into smaller bodies, has always been a matter of wonderment. As a matter of fact, the expedition resulted unsatisfactorily. It was a joint expedition of army and navy. the navy heing represented by
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a squadron of river boats under command of Admiral Porter, and when the army retreated, there was much of difficulty about getting the steam- boats back down the river. One or two of them, in fact, did not get back, but, notwithstanding an exceptional low stage of the river, some lumber- men from Wisconsin with the Western army, put to use their logging ex- perience and built temporary dams, the opening of which made a flood which carried the most of the boats safely down the river. This escape of the gunboats was after the battle of Pleasant Hill, which was the turning point of the expedition,
Prior to that battle, however, and yet more notably after it. there had been manifest one result of the expedition, which has been variously sus- pected to have been its real objective, although no one would ever wish to make such confession. This result was that a large amount of cotton was gotten out of the Red river country and down to the Mississippi, whence it could be shipped to cotton mills in the north. The time was that period of war, when the cutting off of traffic between the north and south had made the price of cotton in the north exceedingly high, and the cotton itself in the south a drug in the market where it was raised. Under such condi- tions, it was a very great favor to the rebels of a mercenary turn, to have some channel through which their cotton could get out of the Confederacy. and it was a corresponding favor to the cotton spinners of the north to have some means by which they could get cotton to their mills. From such conditions, there was possible an immense profit for those officers who were able and willing in their relations to the expedition to mix their military and business affairs ; and from this circumstance, there hangs and always will hang over the Red river expedition a certain cloud of scandal, which was quite as unfortunate as was any of the bad generalship in the fiekl.
But neither in the scandal nor in the bad leadership did the western con- tingent of the army have any share. A prominent western officer who was un- fortunately only third in rank in the expedition, was Gen. A. J. Smith, who was distinctly a fighter and a commander of much capacity and was exceed- ingly admired and trusted by the lowa sokliers under his command. He re- fused to take cotton aboard his transports, and his feelings at the unwarranted retreat from Pleasant Hill and the ensuing failure of the expedition, ex- cepting as pertains to cotton and finance, were so pronounced that it is well authenticated that he deliberately proposed to Gen. Franklin, who was second in rank in the expedition, that fien. Banks, the commander of the expedition, be put under arrest ; that Franklin assume command of the army; that Smith and his command should support Franklin in such as- sumption, and that together they should then attack the enemy whom they would, no doubt, defeat. Franklin said that such proposal was mutiny and did not accept the suggestion, but that such a proposal should have been made by an officer so capable and responsible as Gen. A. J. Smith, is enough to justify the 320 lowa and Shaw's Brigade of which it was a part. in any or all of their complaints over their treatment at Pleasant Hill.
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The battle of Pleasant Hill was fought on the 9th of April, 1864, late in the afternoon. The Union army had been repulsed in an engagement the day before at Mansfield, and had fallen back to Pleasant Hill. Here it took what was, in part at least, a good position, and awaited the attack of the rebels under General Dick Taylor, who appears to have been as little affected by the cotton interest and as much in favor of a real fight as was Gen. A. J. Smith of the Union side.
Of the Union line, the central position was held by Col. W. T. Shaw's brigade of Smith's division. This brigade consisted of the 24th Missouri and 14th, 27th and 32d lowa regiments, the last named being on the left of the brigade. Beyond this brigade, to the left and too far beyond, was the division of Gen. Dwight, an eastern officer, who appears to have been a favorite with Banks, but who, at the time of the battle of Pleasant Hill, appears further to have been in a condition quite unfit for the responsibilities upon him. His forces were so disposed as to leave a considerable gap between them and Shaw's brigade; and when Shaw, with considerable diffi- culty made him understand the matter, he promised to send a regiment to fill the gap, but did not do so. When the rebels charged, the Shaw brigade stopped them effectively, but they passed through the gap, to the left of the 32d Iowa, and swung around in the rear. The position of Shaw's brigade with the rebels in front and on their flank and in their rear, became in- creasingly difficult, but they held their position until the brigade was ordered back to form on the second Union line through which no gaps had yet been afforded to the rebels. In accordance with this command, the 24th Missouri fell back, the 27th Iowa did so, and the 14th Iowa, all of which regiments, and especially the last, had already met great losses in the engagement, but had distinctly held their ground; but the 32d Iowa was off a little too far to the left to get the command to fall back when it was passed down the line, and the officer who was sent with the order was killed before he delivered his message. So the 32d, not being ordered back, staid where it was, and Col. Scott was left to get his command out of its isolated position the best he could. Lientenant-Colonel Mix, and one after another of the other officers had been killed. The companies on the right had some of them been swept back when the 14th Jowa fell back, and it was a much disorganized and broken body of men who still had left the choice of cut- ting their way out through the rebel lines or of surrendering. Apparently the rebels who had gone on and attacked the second Union line had been so abundantly occupied by that line that their opportunity to give to the remnant of the 32d the attention which they might otherwise have given, was limited; so the breaking out for the 32d was not impossible, and the regiment started to the left. In this movement, a fallen tree in the way divided the regiment once more, and the remnants of Companies H and K were thus separated from the others. It thus became very much a free for all fight to get through, and very much, everyone for himself, and Comrade Silas See says that when they did get through and back, and out
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of the fight, he was the only one actually with Capt. Wheeler of Company K; but other troops came in in squads, and the companies reformed after a fashion, and in the gathering dusk, Col. Scott led the remnant of his regiment back to the Union line.
As a matter of fact, the rebel army had been defeated in the final en- gagement ; and those who, in the position of the 32d survivors, had seen the actual condition of the rebels at the end of the battle, knew that the rebels were defeated and retreating; but the truth that Pleasant Hill had been a Union victory did not penetrate to Banks' headquarters. Accord- ingly, in the night, the army was ordered back, and the survivors of the 32d and of the other regiments of Shaw's brigade, were not so much as permitted to return to the abandoned field to bury their dead and gather up their wounded. This conclusion of the battle was attended with in- tense grief and humiliation by the men who had held the line against su- perior numbers and had broken through the surrounding lines of their enemy. The injustice of being ordered, under such circumstances, to retreat was never forgotten nor forgiven; and when the promotion to the brigade gen- eralship, which was certain to come to some colonel in the brigade, was not awarded to the colonel of the regiment that had held the line to the end, but to another colonel of another regiment that had done well, but that had achieved less distinction and suffered smaller losses, the 32d felt that its disappointments were multiplied. The loss of the 32d in this en- gagement, was variously reported as 210, 215 and 220 out of a total of about 500 men engaged. It was an awful fight such as one regiment rarely goes through but once in one war.
After the return of Banks' army down the Red river to the vicinity of the Mississippi, the 32d Iowa was quite actively engaged for a time on general guard duty to keep the rebels from coming too close to the big river ; but soon the regiment went up the river by boat to Vicksburg and thence was sent with many other regiments on a hasty chase after the rebel General Forrest, who was raiding in northern Mississippi and in Ten- nessee. The 32d marched from Vicksburg by way of Jackson to Tupelo near the northeast corner of Mississippi, at which place Forrest was caught and his command badly broken up. In this fight at Tupelo the 2d cavalry with Company B, another of the especial Story County companies, was engaged.
Marching back to Vicksburg, the 32d was shipped by boat to St. Louis, whence it marched across Missouri and back in a chase after the rebel General Sterling Price. Then another steamboat trip took the regiment up the Cumberland to Nashville in time to join in the three-days' fight that destroyed Hood's army. From Nashville the 32d marched across the coun- try to Eastport. Mississippi, which is on the Tennessee river and within a few miles of Tupelo, where the regiment had fought a few months be- fore and whence it had made a very wide circuit. Here the regiment started to build quarters in which to spend the rest of the winter; but before the
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quarters were done, new orders came and the regiment boarded a steam- boat that took it from Eastport down the Tennessee and Ohio to Cairo, thence down the Mississippi, past New Orleans, to the gulf and along the coast to Dolphin Island at the mouth of Mobile bay.
Thus the 32d, marching up the east side of the bay, entered upon its last campaign. It was a campaign whose purpose was to conclude the work which Farragut so well begun when he pushed the Union fleet by the forts at the lower end of the bay and defeated and destroyed the rebel squadron inside. The occupancy of New Orleans and the other points along the Mississippi by the Union army and Sherman's victories about Atlanta and his march to the sea, had left Mobile as the principal point of what was left of the Confederacy in that portion of the south, and the strong de- fenses remaining to Mobile were Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely. These posts the rebels held with a desperation pertaining to the last ditch fight; and though the Union army besieged them in numbers, of white and colored troops together, sufficient to make the outcome of the campaign as certain as any movement can be, yet the rebels offered a defense that made the cam- paign one of the most difficult of the successful campaigns of the war. The Union army besieged the rebel posts, approaching as close as was possible by the usual methods of conducting a siege, and in the end, as- saulted. The assault on Spanish Fort was made on the 8th of April, 1865, and that on Ft. Blakely on the 9th. The remnants of the 32d Iowa were engaged at Spanish Fort and in the thick of the fight at Ft. Blakely, and their victory at the latter point finished their service against organized op- position. This battle was on the afternoon of the day, on the morning of which Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and the two events together marked the close of the war. Afterwards there was some service in chasing the remaining disorganized bands of rebels and in restoring order; but the 32d soon returned home with the other victorious troops, and Company K was welcomed back to Story County with all possible enthusiasm.
CHAPTER XXIV.
HOME AFFAIRS IN WAR TIME.
During the years from 1861 to 1865, the thought, attention and energies of the people of Story County were directed chiefly to matters concerning the war and concerning those who were at the front. But there were other interests. First and foremost was the matter of the railroad. In spite of all of the difficulties concerning the railroad construction in war time, the work of the railroad convention in Cedar Rapids in 1859 had been so well done, and the organization of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad, under the patronage of the Chicago, lowa and Nebraska Railroad had been so fortunate and had commended itself so well to the people of the counties along the line of the proposed railroad from Cedar Rapids westward, that the work of railroad construction did, in fact, progress. The Chicago. Iowa and Nebraska road was completed to Cedar Rapids, and the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad proceeded to build westward. The railroad finally reached Nevada on an ever memorable Fourth of July. 1864. It was extended in 1865 to Boone. and on the last day of 1866 it reached Council Bluffs, being the first railroad from east to west to be completed across the state of lowa.
Other matters of the time inchided some more building in the town of Nevada and growth over the county; also there was a gradually increasing intensity of the struggle in Nevada between the north and south sides of the Slough. The files of the local paper in that time indicate among other things that there was much real trouble over the question of fuel. Ap- parently the timber which the people wanted to use for fuel was getting scarce, and the fashion which became current some ten years later, after barb wire had come into vogue, had not yet found approval, to-wit: That of burning up fence rails for fuel; so we find in the current discussion of that time quite a lot on the subject of peat, and the idea seems to have been seriously entertained that it might be possible to keep lowa warm with peat, in spite of blizzards such as in these later years, lowa people know nothing of. Another matter that for the time excited the very great- est local interest was the discovery that a murder had been committed on the borders of the village of Nevada, the body of the victim buried and his property gone with the murderer. In time, the murderer was arrested,
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